issue via APPTUNE using the tool trace and then resolve the problem. When the new application began displaying severe production-performance issues, the company decided to use APPTUNE during testing and development, especially as it began enhancing and refining this new application. “We had been using this tool for many years before this application for in-production applications. But after our performance issues with the new application, we decided to change how we used it. For example, there’s a batch program that uses APPTUNE reports to produce alert messages. Most of these are now produced in the development and testing department to alert us when there may be queries that need improvement before they go into production,” Baumann says. Thanks to this more widespread use of APPTUNE, Swiss Mobiliar now has a better handle on performance issues, both while applications are in development and being tested and after they’ve been put in production. The company now has a four-pronged performance-management framework. The first involves detecting exceptional queries and alerting the testing and development team to them. The second uses runtime performance data to prompt developers to use utilities and commands such as RUNSTATS, REORG and REBIND. (Previously, it had been using DB2 catalog and real-time statistics only.) And a third is to conduct regular trend analyses. As Baumann explains, “We use it to identify access paths that use more resources over a longer period of time. So APPTUNE is used to analyze statically bound queries. We also use a framework we call M3, which we developed at Swiss Mobiliar, to analyze the behavior of dynamically bound queries and their access paths over a period of time.” APPTUNE hosted some in-house classes to introduce Swiss Mobiliar’s developers to the product’s benefits. This wasn’t necessarily because the tool is difficult to use, but because users must understand what to notice regarding threshold numbers and which are or aren’t important. Using these numbers, developers can now decide how to respond to alerts and how urgently they should respond. “These hands-on classes, where APPTUNE and M3 are used to identify, analyze J U LY/A UGUS T 20 09 ibms ystemsmag .com/mai nframe 25

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